Netflix is introducing a long-awaited feature that will make it easier for the Internet video service to track and analyze the viewing habits of people sharing the same $8-per-month account. …read more

(Phys.org) —Today, astronomers with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III, or SDSS-III – including University of Virginia astronomers – released a new online public data set featuring 60,000 stars that are helping to tell the story of how our Milky Way galaxy formed, the subject of scientific speculation and debate for hundreds of years. …read more

The untold story of how ancient Australians once walked a vast submerged sand plain dissected by rivers and rugged outcrops awaits discovery off WA’s north-west coast, according to a leading expert from The University of Western Australia. …read more

(Phys.org) —The squirming larva of the humble fruit fly, which shares a surprising amount of genetic material with the human being, is helping scientists to understand the way we learn information from one another. …read more

(Phys.org) —Nearly a century after the world’s greatest physicist, Albert Einstein, first predicted the existence of gravitational waves, a global network of gravitational wave observatories has moved a step closer to detecting the faint radiation that could lead to important new discoveries in our universe. …read more

(Phys.org) —Murdoch University researchers have developed a ‘green’ method to create antibacterial gold nanoparticles for potential use in the medical field with the help of common eucalyptus leaves. …read more

(Phys.org) —The Saturn moons Mimas and Pandora remind us of how different they are when they appear together, as in this image taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Pandora’s small size means that it lacks sufficient gravity to pull itself into a round shape like its larger sibling, Mimas. Researchers believe that the elongated shape of Pandora (50 miles, or 81 kilometers across) may hold clues to how it and other moons near Saturn’s rings formed. …read more

(Phys.org) —The floor of a NASA hangar and an adjacent laboratory in Southern California’s high desert have been in constant motion this month as scientists prepare their instruments for installation on two of the agency’s specialized science aircraft that will begin a major NASA airborne science campaign in early August. …read more

(Phys.org) —In a paper shortly to be published in the Oxford University Press journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of astronomers from the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland report the discovery of two unusual stars with extremely high concentrations of lead in their atmospheres. …read more

(Phys.org) —Past climates shaped the current hotspots of genetic diversity for the grey long-eared bat, one of the UK’s rarest mammals, but future climate change threatens these biodiversity hotspots, according to researchers from the University of Bristol, working in collaboration with scientists from the University of Sheffield and from across Europe. …read more

(Phys.org) —Researchers working at a lab at Harvard University have developed a technique that allows for taking the temperature of individual living cells. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the team describes their technique and just how precise temperature measurements taken with it can be. …read more

(Phys.org) —To live together harmoniously in our bodies, cells need to be able to distinguish which of those among them are sanctioned residents and which are interlopers. This way, native cells can be left alone to do their jobs, and foreign cells can be attacked and removed. …read more

(Phys.org) —A combined team of researchers from Arizona State University and Uppsala University in Sweden has found that collective decision making by ants doesn’t always result in selecting the best option for adopting a new nest. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes experiments they conducted with ants and artificially lit nests to determine how the ants chose the best option. …read more

Learn With Homer is a new app that provides a comprehensive contextualized literacy curriculum that kids can use at home on the iPad. The app is created by Stephanie Dua, a well-known education reformer who led the effort to improve understanding of the intent and implementation of the Common Core publishing criteria …read more

If Twitter is the chirping chatterbox of the Internet, trolls are its dark underground denizens. The collision of the two is driving a debate in Britain about the scale of online hatred and the limits of Internet free speech. …read more